"Like
You Like It deserves great success, too, and will wind
up being produced extensively in high schools - but not
for years, for a boffo Broadway run will undoubtedly come
first."
-Peter
Filichia, theatremania.com
“Composer
Acquisto gleefully sends up the era's music, and the tunes
he's devised incorporate various rock, punk, and pop styles.”
-Matthew Murray, talkingbroadway.com
“We
hope you’ll be seeing a bigger production of this
one on the boards before long.”
-gothamist.com
“Librettist-lyricist
Buck's liberty-taking is the kind of which it's said,
‘If Shakespeare were alive today, he would have
written like this.’”
-David Finkle, theatremania.com
“Thank
you for telling me it will all work out like you like
it. Can I give you a hug?”
It
takes chutzpah to transform a Shakespeare comedy into a
musical. The plots, late Renaissance equivalents of the
campus musical, are there for the plucking, but there's
no escaping the language comparisons that are invited. Sometimes
-- as with, for instance, the John Guare-Galt MacDermot
tuner Two Gentlemen of Verona and Danny Apolinar's
Your Own Thing, the laudable cockiness inherent
in such undertakings works into the piece itself.
That has happened again with Like
You Like It, the spirited entertainment that librettist-lyricist
Sammy Buck and composer Daniel S. Acquisto have made of
the Bard's As You Like It. The title alone, recognizing
contemporary disregard for correct grammar, signals craftiness
and craft. The Buck-Acquisto imaginations extend to moving
the Bard's Arden Forest to Arden Mall, where teens celebrating
1983 trendiness try to connect with each other while playing
hooky. Rosalind Duke (Rebecca Bellingham) is chased by
Orlando Bateman (Charlie Mechling) until she catches him
and simultaneously brings together other hormone-happy
couples.
Librettist-lyricist Buck's liberty-taking
is the kind of which it's said, "If Shakespeare were
alive today, he would have written like this." Maybe
-- although he probably wouldn't have put "Holy crap,
he's talking to me" into Rosalind's otherwise witty
mouth, and he might have found a way to keep his amusing
first-act wrestling match in the action. He also would
have thought twice before eliminating the seven-ages-of-man
Jacques from the dramatis personae. Among the welcome
additions in this show directed by Jen Bender and choreographed
by Stephen Nachamie is a rock singer (Michele Ragusa)
who calls Chrissie Hynde to mind.
The score is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
Rock is the mode, and a rock band is situated upstage,
playing under Gillian Berkowitz's direction. Though tunesmith
Acquisto is too busy emulating '80s sounds to establish
a sound unique to him, the melodies are serviceable. Buck's
lyrics are more than that: "Easy Way Out," "So
Close So Far Way" and "Be With Me" would
be chart-climbers if this were a time when show tunes
still climbed charts.
Like
You Like It is so knowing that, at one point, Rosalind
-- having strutted through Arden in man's clothes -- cries,
"I'm a girl dressed as a boy. Can't anyone see that?"
How Rosalind gets away with her thinly-veiled ruse is
a question that Shakespeare audiences have asked for centuries.
It's clever of Buck to have her call attention to the
flimsy disguise, and that's only one of many examples
of this musical's cleverness.
-David
Finkle, theatremania.com 10/1/04
From gothamist.com:
Like
You Like It takes familiar subject matter – Shakespeare’s
As You Like It – and reworks it as musical
theatre. The twist here is that Rosalind, Orlando, and the
other familiar Shakespeare characters have been updated
to John Hughes-esque teenagers in the 1980’s. The
score is loaded with period musical references like Men
Without Hats and the dialogue references pop cultural touchstones
such as Swatch watches and Rubicks Cubes. Our eighties obsession
was in overdrive, though we were surprised that some of
the pop cultural references seemed to fly over the heads
of lots of audience members.
It’s
clear that librettist-lyricist Sammy Buck and composer
Daniel S. Acquisto have a great love for the eighties
and for their characters. They have written these teens
with a lot of heart. Even the bitchy girl gets an interesting
treatment and transcends cliché. We hope you’ll
be seeing a bigger production of this one on the boards
before long.
